Great read - a few classic bits - especially this one - beautiful sum up of Manly 9 days out of 10
“Being a shaper that’s what you do, you watch people surf, you’re looking at the trends. Nearly everyone walked past me looked like Kelly Slater or Mick Fanning or ****en Parko. They all looked the same, they all had the right gear on, and had the latest thing under their arm and they were all out in the water,” he begins.“I counted 35 waves that were caught and ridden and 35 waves with different people riding them before someone did more than one turn! They’d go to the bottom and fall off or they’d push too hard and fall off, or they’d try an air,” he laughs.
His earlier piece
He made him two boards - a 6'6"x18 1/4 x 2 5/16 and a 6'9" x 18 3/8" x 2 3/8.
“With Tom’s one I knew J-bay having been there, it’s an amazing wave where you can ride boards with a lot of waterline length and still do shorter-board maneuvers because the wave has so much draw off the reef.”
Might be true - but everytime I see footage of that wave I think how much better TC would have surfed on a board that was shorter and slightly thicker. You see footage of him these days on a 5'4" and he is killing it. So something in the middle of that would have been great I reckon - 6'6" just looks far too long to me in this day for that size. MF rides a sub 6 in 6 foot stuff these days as do most of them.
I'm heading over in 4 weeks, that would suck if they banned alc 
